The smartest animals are the best animals to Run the Farm. What other arguement can be made? How about the strongest animals that mean us no harm as determined by a competitive system in which free speech allows a true test of their strength and character? No, no, that would not be "smart" since the pigs would not win. PIGS ruling us is the only way out of the crisis. There is a crisis you know. The planet is about to kill everyone with melting ice, say the Pigs.

All pigs are equal, but some are more equal than others - some get tot turn their thermostat up to 75 while some must shiver in the cold, some can jump in their private jet and fly across the country for valentine's dinner, while others must curtail their use of fuel... Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama preach sacrifice for those lesser pigs, but not for themselves.

Eliot wrote: “After all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm – in fact there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.”

The genious of a free people is the full use of the talents of all of the proven qualified people. The truely dumb method is using a false separation of people by Credentials from birth or an elites only Credential Mill (E.g. Harvard and Yale) and freezing out truly intelligent competitors, like a Palin, who has not been to the Credential Mill, but rose on her abilities. No wonder all the "Educated and Credentialed" Elites favor the Communist Paradise where they plan to be promoted. The dirty truth is that they will all be murdered as soon as the Highest Pig is in full control.

Great quote pal. Babe is like the anti-animal house. It is about good will and humility and service and love. One of my favorite characters is Rex, who saves the day by accepting his limitations and humbling himself.

Speaking of rejection, way back in the 1960s, I wrote a fable in novella form about self-perfection, love and hope that got dinged all over the place before I finally gave up trying to sell it.

It told the story of a squirrel who is bored with squabbling over food and who is thrilled by the sheer acrobatic joy of leaping from tree to tree. His non-conformity gets him banished but he meets two other squirrels who take him to a higher plane of existence where the squirrels dance for joy in the tree tops.

Through perseverance, and the guidance of a wise elder squirrel, he learns to defy time and space. The secret is to begin by knowing you have already arrived.

He returns to the domain of the squabbling squirrels and teaches the other non-conformists how to transcend themselves before he moves on to spread his message.

The article notes that Eliot thought well of the book as a literary effort:

"Eliot praised its 'good writing' and 'fundamental integrity'. However, the book’s politics, at a time when Britain was allied with the Soviet Union against Hitler, were another matter. 'We have no conviction that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the current time,' wrote Eliot, adding that he thought 'its view, which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not convincing.'"

Not "the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the current time"? The "view" of Animal Farm is "generally Trotskyite"?

Two thoughts. Eliot's comments show how thoroughly steeped in admiration for Stalin the British intelligentsia was, that he viewed Animal Farm through such a cracked lens.

Second, this just shows, fairly spectacularly, that poets (and artists in general) are better off sticking to what they know, which is rarely politics or economics.

“The underlying motive of many Socialists, I believe, is simply a hypertrophied sense of order. The present state of affairs offends them not because it causes misery, still less because it makes freedom impossible, but because it is untidy; what they desire, basically, is to reduce the world to something resembling a chessboard.”

Elcubanito: Yeah, but I'm neither French nor British (though I regard Brit Lit as vastly more satisfying than Froggish). From my unbiased perch, I declare the Proust snub bigger, or at least more scandalous because it's a much greater work of art. The snubber, however, in the British case, is much greater than in the French.

Ann: Where I come from, when the editor sends it back without glancing at it, that's a rejection. I'm not sure which I'd feel more snubbed by if I received both kinds. (And I've received both, as you know.)

I love the part where the sheep tell the pig he's going to be killed and eaten for Christmas and then the spider writes messages in its web like "Great Pig" and "radiant," and "fantastic speaker," and "mesmerizing orator" and ... oh blast ... I'm sorry. Never mind.

One thinks of the pigs of Animal Farm when one runs into the occasional thread discussion over at The Volokh Conspiracy where some of the commenter attorneys there (not blog principals) put forward with all seeming seriousness that attorneys should run the whole shebang (i.e., that only lawyers should be considered qualified to hold higher office in America). Right.

Reminds me a bit of the Discovery/ National Geo, etc. piece I saw last week on feral pigs. They are getting to be a big problem some places in this country, and are extraordinarily hard to keep under control. If we hunt by day, they feed at night. If we use lights, they avoid them. And they learn this very quickly. And with farms nearby, they have enough food to support a lot of population growth. With man (with dogs) as their only predator, their is little controlling their population.

TMink...i take back every nasty I've ever hurled your way. This was the epic of "good triumphant" and if you enjoyed it and still marvel at it, then I have nothing and forevermore bad to say to you or about you.

Elliot's view is exactly the view Keynes endorsed in his famous letter to Hayek -- the replacement of a liberal society with a elite run statist society would be just fine in Britain, all that mattered was the right "public spirit" on the part of the pigs.